Forget about rabbit holes and mirrors, this Alice finds her Wonderland via the stage door. Following a magician into the wings, she trips on a trap door and the rest is pure theatre. In a rich and hallucinatory production first seen in 2011, director Theresa Heskins matches the imagination of Lewis Carroll with a theatrical inventiveness of her own.
As well as offering a colourful compendium of Carroll’s characters, the show is a demonstration of the transformative possibilities of the stage. It is in the way Alice knocks back the bottle labelled “drink me” and grows enormous, her dress tumbling in layers to the ground. It is in the way she shrinks, then shrinks some more, her place taken by stand-ins and puppets.
Most overtly, it is in the tricks of the Great Blanco (Peter Watts) who can magic squares of a chess board into the air or make Alice disappear. It is also in the creatures who stalk the stage, from an enormous Cheshire Cat with glowing eyes to a fire-breathing Jabberwock snapping its metal jaws and making the children scream (great work from puppetry director Paschale Straiton).
Add the songs by James Atherton and the continual ensemble movement, and you have a theatrical wonderland the equal of Carroll’s.
The sheer abundance of ideas is one way Heskins sidesteps the problem of dramatising such an episodic book. The other way is to underline Alice’s struggle to return home. Katie Cannon (covering for Eleanor Fransch) is excellent as a no-nonsense Alice, the illiterate daughter of a barge-dwelling Stoke-on-Trent family, who is as much irritated as beguiled by the eccentric characters. Her outrage at “the stupidest tea party I have ever been to” is deeply felt.
• At New Vic theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 28 January.
